


Lullaby

by Faemonic



Series: Songs of the Sunsets [4]
Category: Otherfaith Religion & Lore
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-08 13:28:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6856945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Faemonic/pseuds/Faemonic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Imagine this chase scene set to "Yakety Sax".</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Secrets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Remember that time I erased everybody’s memories?”_
> 
>  
> 
> **The fuck kind of question is that?**

“No screaming,” young Althea Altair warned, as she dragged aside one of the gate-doors to her temple. “And no hugs.”

Princess Irene exhaled out her nose, loudly and at length, and let her arms drop to hanging at her sides.

Beside her, Althea’s sister took a moment to fold the sleeves of the similarly blue and hooded garment that she wore, by each hand up to the elbows of the opposite arm. Together, they pushed aside the other gate-door, which sounded as low and smooth a rumble as the first. Lilibell asked, “And why shouldn’t I show my longing relieved, when I’ve been so long apart from my beloved twin?” Although she said ‘twin’, Lilibell appeared in the bloom of her youth whereas Althea appeared to still be in the bud. If Irene hadn’t known better, she thought there ought to still be a hint of the truth in the Oracle’s milky and unfocused gaze, the wisdom of lifetimes weighed every syllable of her voice.

“I’m training sphinxes,” Althea answered. “Giant housecats with wings, anyway, we don’t know what else to call them yet. They respond to noise with more noise. Come in and I’ll show you—but quietly.”

They entered, and Lilibell helped to close the gates behind them. “Why no hugs?”

“Because you both smell like swamp.” Althea turned her gaze from Lilibell, to Irene, then back to Lilibell. “All right, I’ll take _one_.”

Lilibell fell to her knees and pulled Althea towards her, giving out a sort of keening purr.

“Not so loud,” Althea warned her, one eye closed tight against Lilibell’s hair. The other examined Irene up and down—or, level and up and more up, because young Althea was a petite figure. “You’ve cut your hair. Again.”

Irene signed that she had committed to cultivating views of virtues and values during her self-imposed exile to the Wastes, and considered personal power a distraction at best and fated for corruption at worst.

“That is the worst idea you have ever gone through with,” Althea remarked.

Irene signed, reluctantly, that she remembered attacking the Firebird in his own nest once.

“The worst,” the Oracle repeated, with emphasis.

Lilibell released her, arose and said, “You’re only saying that because you’re afraid of what Alynah will do come Hell Month.”

Althea gave a momentary, childish, sneer and turned to lead them down the path through the courtyard.

To Lilibell, Irene furtively signed her enquiries as to what their daughter could possibly be planning.

“Nobody knows if she even plans anything, ever,” Lilibell replied. “But our cardinal gods will be away, the ordinal ones still being very young, and among the rest of us…Well, Alynah remains the most powerful Western spirit known—second only maybe to the unknown.” Lilibell reached out to scuffle Irene’s short hair.

Irene frowned and signed: **Now you’re both just making fun of me.**

Althea had made her way ahead, and called behind her without turning around. “After all we’ve been through, she still thinks I have a sense of humor!”

 **Oh, no, that’s just eerie!** Irene signed. **I forgot to type on the grid when you first asked me, but you still understood the language—even though I spent all this time in the Wastes learning and you’ve stayed here. How can you know what I’m saying when you don’t even look at me?**

Still without turning around, Althea tapped her own head and called the reply, “Oracle!”

Irene halted, turned a weary look to Lilibell, and signed: **Please tell me that preparing to battle your daughter is not what I’m here for.**

Lilibell laughed and walked ahead, pulling Irene by the hand after her. They followed Althea through the archway of a red brick wall. “Still such an old world faery! Nobody does classical conquest anymore, at least not here. Were you planning to take a stand amongst dozens or hundreds of ancient alliances and enmities, and their flags or…something? We can be more civilized than that, you know.” As they reached the first bend of the labyrinth, Lilibell turned abruptly—her face and voice solemn. “Alynah has the Blakes with her, though we can’t get them to admit it. The size of her troupe now rivals the flower maidens. Think about it. At least think about it.”

Irene, leaning away awkwardly, craned her own neck to peer at the wall behind Lilibell through which Althea had vanished. After Lilibell had stared enough in silence that she’d (evidently) felt that the gravity of the proposal had impressed itself upon Irene, they both followed.

 

* * *

 

They passed through the wall and into a vast plane of what appeared to be a single sandstone. In the far distance stood a mountain range made of red brick, or a red brick wall that had crumbled at the top. In the middle distance, two small girls had caught Althea in a cruel sort of game. They spun slacks of rope by the handles, and the Oracle hopped between them to prevent being struck by the ropes or tripped. The rope-wranglers, familiar to Irene as the Laetha Ava and Laetha Alma, chorused: “ _Red flame! Yellow flame! Warm flame, burn! Green flame! Purple flame! Wild flame, turn! Black flame! Cold flame! Tame flame, wonder! White flame, shame flame, blame game—sunder!_ ”

Althea hopped out of the oblong tunnel of tripping-rope, turned, and dipped a cautious bow to the Laethas. With an ominous lack of interest, the Laethas exchanged rope handles, so that each held both ends of a single rope instead.

Althea told the two other spirits swathed in swamp-smelling ofelian blues, “They’ll agree to forget you were here, when you’re not meant to be.”

Ava leaned against Alma and covered her own mouth and her twin’s ear with a hand. After a moment of muffled conversation on Ava’s side, the two parted, giggling, and set off skipping over their ropes.

Althea led them towards the red-brick mountain range, and up the elevator to a peak that she called a tower, even though it was much wider than it was tall.

The elevator doors opened to a giant winged housecat that sat like a sphinx and refused to move.

Althea warned, “If you try to climb over the kitty, it’ll think you’re playing and bite you. Give them a riddle they don’t know the answer to, though, and they’ll go away to think about it. They’ll hunt you down later, to annoy you with all the possible answers they could think up.”

Lilibell chirruped, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

The riddle-cat yawned and replied, with a whiskery voice, “They both produce very flat notes.”

At that, Lilibell pouted. “Alice told me that riddle didn’t have a real answer.”

Irene began to sign her own attempt at a riddle, although it had been a riddle she caught from the human world. In a spoken or written human language, the riddle would have gone: _“In marble walls as white as milk, lined with a skin as soft as silk, within a fountain crystal clear, a golden apple doth appear. No doors there are to this stronghold, yet thieves break in and steal the gold.”_ In the Ophelian language of Sign, much of the rhyme and metaphor was lost. Irene, not yet fluent enough to translate, instead transliterated: **A white eggshell contains an egg membrane, egg whites, and egg yolk. The eggshell has no natural openings, so egg-breakers break the eggshell of the egg and take the egg yolk out of the egg. What is the item described in this riddle? This is the mystery.** The riddle-cat understood enough to consider the riddle unanswerable, and grudgingly stood to leave. Ey pawed at the only window in the only—otherwise dungeonlike—room beyond the elevator doors, until the window swung open and the riddle-cat took flight.

Althea strode to the wall opposite the entrance. Lilibell jumped up to gently shut the window, and less gently peered out from the corner of it—with such a sudden suspicion and hostility that Irene’s hand involuntarily twitched towards the weapon holstered at her own hip.

The Oracle pressed at a series of bricks in the wall as though they were buttons, then stepped back as an arch-shaped section of the wall turned on an axis. A shimmering flag hung from the wall’s secret, hidden side.

Althea turned to Irene and signed, clumsily: **This is what we called you here for. At the gates of the West await a troop of faeries from the old world. If you would recognize the symbols on the flag, we can be better prepared to negotiate with them.**

Irene signed: **The old world was another life I can barely remember.**

Althea nodded behind Irene, where Lilibell had signed a reply. **Lily is correct, we can at least make the effort. Lily said the main symbol resembles an Aletheian heart, symmetrical, mirroring curves to a point, and a bolt of lightning contained within it—?**

Irene signed, more decisively: **No, definitely wrong.** She turned to Lilibell and signed, **That is a heart. But. The jagged lines don’t represent lightning, but a fissure. It means the person which the heart represents is empty and broken.**

Lilibell rolled her eyes and signed: **Whatever, you glum puddle.**

Irene signed objections that her family had a heraldry exactly like that—then she halted her signing and widened her eyes, blood freezing with the realization that her family had heraldry _exactly like that_.

At that moment, a ringtone filled the room. Althea turned a weary and accusing glance at Irene, then to Lilibell, until she realized it was her own cellular phone ringing.

“Secret meeting in the secret tower!” Althea grumbled as she checked the screen. “I _told everyone_ about it so they would know not to call me during—Oh, it’s the Laetha Alaria,” she explained, “I’ve got to take this. Hello?” She pressed the celphone to her ear. After a long pause in which tinny almost-syllables barely moved the air of the room, occasionally interrupted by a hum or _uh-huh_ from Althea, the Oracle said, “But that’s well outside our bailiwick and completely unnecessary.” After another long pause, Althea added, “I meant, she’s here—both are. Not in the Waste. I’ll put you on speaker, you can explain it to them. Terrible timing, by the way.”

 _“…same about you,”_ Alaria’s voice sounded through the room. After a pause, the god continued, _“Irene, if you’re really there, umm…Remember that time I erased everybody’s memories?”_

Irene tore her gaze away from the flag and frowned, signing: **The fuck kind of question is that?**

The twins chorused a more diplomatic, “She remembers.”

_“Unfortunately, so do all the Aletheia androids, when they’re not supposed to. And they do not appreciate the role you played in the destruction of unit three.”_

Althea balked. “Alaria, they weren’t even there. Princess Irene was trying to help. The Ophelene herself will testify to this! Aletheia double-oh three wasn’t only repaired, but upgraded! What does he have to say about this?”

Irene pulled the flag from the wall (the flag rustled) and signed at Lilibell.

 _“They wouldn’t listen to him even if he_ were _speaking up,”_ Alaria replied, _“That means you stay out of this, too, Althea. Keep Irene out of the city. Keep Irene in the tower, even in the temple—it’s the last place they’ll look, and even if they had the means or circumspection to tap this call they won’t tear their own temple apart to get to her. I’ll call you back when my team has subdued them. Understand?”_

“No,” Althea said. “I’ll do it, but it doesn’t make sense to me why they suddenly would have—”

_“That was not a suggestion, that was a command. Do not allow Irene to leave the premises.”_

“Fine!” Althea snapped, then jabbed the button to end the call. She glanced up in time to catch Lilibell boosting Irene out the open window. “Lili!”

Lilibell squeaked out the corner of her mouth: “Fly!” Irene tumbled out the window in the form of a bird—some bird of prey, perhaps a shade too soft for it, and with a streaming crest of bright yellow. With a flag corner pinched in her beak, she beat her wings towards the gates of the West.


	2. Chase

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Princess Irene flees from a great many dangers.

A downdraft carried the magnificent bird to the edge of the labyrinth. Ava led a procession of riddlecats around the outermost wall. They followed her with a tempered curiosity, because she was winged and clawed and tiny like one of their kittens. Where their paws padded, the flagstones crumbled into gravel and sand.

Alma sat between the shoulder blades of the last riddlecat in line, and hurled away what appeared to be chips of raw rubies at the side that faced the temple courtyard. Several paces behind her, the seeds had ripened into bricks and oozed with wet cement. The giant Erann, far behind them, almost effortlessly weeded out the walls that had overgrown.

Irene missed the outermost labyrinth wall on which she'd attempted to perch, and regain her bearings. A flurry of feathers and silk tumbled before the golden Laetha, the force of the fall sending a spray of gravel at Ava as she screamed in fright and outrage. The first riddlecat cawed instead of yowled in response, a sharp loud cry that was immediately echoed by the riddlecat that followed the first, and the riddlecats that followed the second, and on and on. Hundreds of furious eyes flashed, amber and clear, as their screams united in a single chord. Ava’s mouth moved as she spoke, probably saying something sarcastic judging by her expression, but Irene couldn’t hear the words over the scream of the riddlecats. Ava reached out and slashed at one of Irene’s wingtips. With that form unable to fly, Irene took a more human form to sign her apologies as she bolted for the gate of the temple, the silken flag now pinched between her teeth.

 

* * *

Irene came to the banks of a river, and with the hand at the end of her uninjured arm she picked up a stone and let it drop into the waters.

Three faces of the Ophelia arose from the waters. The first appeared like a whirl of dust like shards of glass, stirring up a chill air that tasted of steel. The second appeared in wisps of mist that coalesced into raindrops. The third churned restlessly, and the air around her tasted of salt and smelled of ozone.

Irene signed at them, pleading for transport to the edge of the West. From there, she could find the gates herself, hopefully before the Aletheias found her.

 _“Alas,”_ murmured the Sky Ophelia, _“We would not even return the Lightning Horse. I have given the Alices word to remain at rest.”_

 _“Others whisper that you invaded the Firebird’s nest at a word from us, we had never said,”_ sternly spoke the Winter Ophelia, drawing her sword from its scabbard. _“We must not act in any way complicit now. Righteous retribution is set in motion. I was not the one to cut your arrogance and thoughtlessness with shards of ice.”_

 _“I was not the one to cleanse the pollution from your heart,”_ the Sky Ophelia added.

At last the Ocean Ophelia spoke in a rasping, throbbing voice: _“I cannot restore what I do not possess, and never possessed. The Laethic part of myself yearns to salt your wounds and catch you in a riptide. I would send the sharks after the scent of your blood, and would revel as the panic and exhaustion devours your life. How fittingly glass and flame have taken your tongue, and they come for the rest—”_

And then they were gone. Irene felt her mouth as dry as the sandstone around the Laetha’s temple tower.

 _“You may slake your thirst here,”_ said the River Ophelia. _“Take the ways through forests and fields, as far from the cities as you can. I can give you no more aid than this.”_

 

* * *

The open fields were no guarantee of safety. Irene encountered the first Aletheia that day in a meadow. She turned at the sound of a roaring rush, to find the glint of gold, shining with the flaming rockets that were the distant android’s limbs.

The distant android flew, decreasingly distant.

And Irene stood her ground and drew her gun. This android appeared unaccompanied. She could take on one alone, she thought. Perhaps not to the android’s death—they were living weapons forged in war, after all—but to go on for longer.

 _After all,_ she thought, as she sighted down the barrel _—I don’t deserve this._

_Do I?_

Doubt stilled her finger on the trigger. The Althea flew closer, close enough that she could almost read the number on the android’s collar—

A burst of red flame appeared between them and coalesced into young Althea. She reached up with one milky-pale hand, and stopped the android in mid-flight. The rocket flames dimmed, the android gliding low until she—Irene thought this one might be a she, because Irene thought that about everyone at first—flopped gently in the meadow and sighed smoke.

“Overheated,” Althea explained. “Not pleasant, not fatal either.”

Irene signed, angrily: **What are you doing? I could have shot you!**

“You couldn’t shoot him, and he was actually attacking!” Althea argued. “I didn’t merely buy you time, I saved your life. Don’t thank me _too_ much, you’re embarrassing me.”

**This isn’t fair. The Laetha is a god!**

“The Laetha is a broken human being. And the consequences of what you’ve done don’t go away just because you’ve changed, or suffered.”

**What will it take, then? Is redemption only a mask of the downward spiral from one misstep to an inevitable ultimate doom? Any good I try to do comes to be regarded as hypocrisy, including the amends! What will it take?**

“Give me your heart.” Althea outstretched one hand, and drew a dagger with the other. “Let me cut it out of you. The Laetha Alaria was right, they’ll never attack the temple, and the temple is wherever a god and their people meet in goodwill. They don’t all get along—but they wouldn’t try to rip you to shreds anymore. We do have some codes of conduct.”

Irene hesitated, clutching the flag more tightly in one hand.

“You aren’t going to make it to the gates with all the Aletheia searching!” Althea snapped. “Even if—If you do, what sort of life would you come back to? Would you count on the Clarene to mind you every moment, for all time?” When Irene continued to stand, obstinate and stubborn, Althea lowered her own hand and sheathed her dagger. “I won’t come to your aid again today.”

Unwisely, Irene allowed her lips to quirk a smile.

“If you think this will be like every other time I said that I wouldn’t leave the temple, you should ask yourself: What’s the worst that can happen, this time, if you count on me to break my word… _and I don’t do it?_ ” With that, Althea combusted into flames, and she and the flames vanished.

Irene picked the bullets out of her gun then, with a frustrated shout, hurled the weapon against the grassy ground. She kicked the sleeping Aletheia's body so hard that the force drove her own toenails into her foot. The golden exterior of the Aletheia wasn't even dented. Irene pressed her opposite hand against the seeping wound on her arm, and she limped, as fast as she could, towards the forest.

 

* * *

To move through this forest was more like a horizontal climb. A carpet of either very small-bladed grasses or very large-bladed mosses had flooded over the ground. Irene could hear the rockets of other Aletheia mecha rumble over the forest canopy, like an incoming storm.

A figure strode across her line of vision, startling her. This figure was of a familiar height, with fair hair like Lilibell, and spoke with her voice. “When they pass, you should notice how silent this part of the forest really is. Even the aspens have stilled.” She turned, saying, “Something terrible must have scared everything else away. Oh, don’t look at me like that, Irene. You left Double-oh Nine to his fever dreams in a field.”

 **Since when could you and your sister teleport?** Irene signed.

“They also say,” she added, “That you snuck into the Laetha’s temple, swooped down on the Laetha Ava unawares, and left her covered in blood. How could you attack a child like that?”

Irene was too busy signing her objections to notice the expression on Lilibell’s face was more earnest than reproving. Word for word, what had been spoken was true—Irene had taken the backyard gates, Irene had swooped, and there had been bloodshed. But Lilibell herself had snuck in with her, and should have known that it was more against temple protocol than the spirit of the, well, the spirits. Irene had been as unawares as Ava, and Ava was usually covered in someone else’s blood and could very well take care of herself—

“I’ve upset you.” The speaker shrugged, smiling. “That’s what comes of a voice that brings death to contentedness. The Aletheia will do that with more than a voice, won’t they? That will be such fun!”

 **But—** Irene almost signed that it wasn’t true, or at least must have the distinction of being a dishonest truth—and then a thought struck her. Lilibell wouldn’t need to be _told_ this. She wouldn’t have bought into a lie. Irene, instead, made a sign—not one from the silent language of the Ophelians, but a gesture that everyone in the West knew, formed of some collective instinct and agreement, like an upraised middle finger, or the exacerbated pressing of the palm to one’s own face. This was a sign-word against the ultimate evil, whose name they’d all but forgotten.

Mircea smiled wider still with Lilibell’s face, and he spoke with her voice. “You’ve got to start using real words. I can’t understand you otherwise.” The sign against evil wasn’t magic, then. Irene had discarded her gun back in the meadow. As for words that Mircea would be willing to understand, well, there could be some communication grid even in the deepest part of this forest. Were Irene to reach out for a holographic sensor and type her words, every Aletheia in the West would be able to trace her from the network.

Irene reached out, tremulously, but managed to type: **Nobody gave you permission to take that form.**

He smugly wagged Lilibell’s finger at her in response. “By the laws of this realm, I don’t need permission to survive and exist. ‘Where the love and truth of each is free.’ I have a different kind of love and truth. That doesn’t make me any less of a person.”

 **Actually, it does,** Irene typed. **You don’t really exist.**

_(The storm of rockets, just beginning to grow distant, began to grow in volume once more. The androids had detected her.)_

“Lilibell is the flesh of my fire,” Mircea said, ignoring her. “I already have her. And I will, because I always have.”

 **You never existed,** Irene insisted. **Lilibell took the starfire of the Dierne. Whatever Althea might have inherited, the real Firebird remedied lifetimes ago.**

“You don’t really believe that gossip, do you?”

 **You won’t go near Lilibell ever again except over my dead body!** Despite the boldness in the statement, Irene’s knees trembled worse than her arms, and she knelt to stop herself from fainting. A wave of coldness and nausea overcame her, and terror— _He’s right, she thought, he’s right, just admit it, and maybe you’ll get through this, and maybe this guilt will stop gnawing at you. You want to be a good person, don't you? Then make the people around you feel contented for once._

Or, Irene thought that she thought this, but when she raised her head she saw that Mircea had shifted forms. Irene’s own face looked down upon her, a smug and haughty expression framed by cascades of long hair, and Mircea's lips moved as though just finished speaking.

“Over your dead body? I can arrange for that.” The Mircean Irene, enraged at having been caught at generating that loathsome mindvoice, transformed into a bird—the same shape as the Firebird, but blazing white and draped with iron chains.

Distantly, from above and behind her, the same voice of the Aletheia shouted words that Irene didn’t type. _“Duck!”_

 _No—Firebird,_ Irene thought. _But if I stand down then he wins!_

Irene stood up. As the false firebird spread his wings, lengths of chain shot out and fell upon Irene’s shoulders, wrapped themselves around her arms, weighed her down and pulled her towards him.

“Resistance is futile,” Mircea remarked with the Firebird’s voice.

Irene, for lack of a tongue, or free hands with which to sign or type, shouted a series of vowels by which she meant: _Surrender is futile! You don’t think I’ve tried, for people I actually like, or for reasons actually right? Wherever you’re taking me, I want the opposite way! If you think you’ve worn me down, let me warn you that I’m gathering my fury and biding my time until—_

A blaze of gold, like a comet, struck across the taught chains between them. It severed the links with a gummy sort of heat. Irene tumbled with the release.

By the time she’d scrambled to her feet again, Mircea and his chains were gone, as though they had never been. Two Aletheia androids descended gently onto the moss before her, rockets burning at their elbows and knees. One was unnumbered at the collar—so, Irene knew this one must be Aletheia 003, or technically, Aletheia 127.

The other one had no mouth. Irene cupped her face with her hands, as though to keep her jaw in, and backed away.

“We won’t shoot you,” A003 said. “We’re trying to help. Both of us. We did help!”

Irene signed, **You shouldn’t have! Mircea can take so many forms now, on his own, that he couldn’t before! That’s what happens when you give him attention.**

“Well, I never! We’re divine Aletheia,” A003 grumbled. “We were designed to recognize and fight off that sort of thing. You only took to this fight because it came upon you accidentally.”

 **You shouldn’t have helped, and considering what’s been going on lately—you wouldn’t,** Irene signed to Aletheia 003. To the other one, she signed: **_You_ never _do_ help. What’s going on?**

The Aletheia remained silent for just long enough for Irene to feel less self-righteous and more awkward.

Aletheia 001 broke the silence. “That hurt my feelings.”

 **How much hurt?** Irene signed the enquiry. **Like having your mandible ripped from your skull? I have feelings there, too, you know! I’m remembering those feelings right now!**

“I didn’t know that we were so incompatible.”

**What was your first clue?**

“The diversity patch,” Aletheia 001 explained, patiently. “I used to only see the mechanism—and I had an electronic sort of tongue, but no mouth. You had no tongue, and I thought you wouldn’t miss your jaw. I didn’t know that I couldn’t use it.”

**You can speak perfectly well now!**

“Yes,” Aletheia 001 replied, “After all the harm I had done to you…You gave me a voice, regardless.”

Aletheia 003 added, wryly, “I’m sure her royal highness didn’t mean for that to happen.”

Aletheia 001 nodded. “Still, the Clarene would have only set a communications grid for her lover. She would never do so for a shard of her own child. The Clarene created me without a mouth.”

Irene flinched as she remembered her Mircean mirror. So, that was what she looked like from the outside after all. She grunted, uncomfortably. Then she signed to Aletheia 003: **So, you could only convince one other android that I’m not the worst.**

“Give me some credit, it’s not even noon yet! The mental archive lock failed at daybreak.”

Aletheia 001 joked, “Alaria must have used old world faery magic, so unreliable.” Upon catching sight of Irene’s upraised middle finger, A001 added, “Aaand I’m less convinced that you’re not the worst.”

“She’s joking,” A003 remarked, and Irene was about to insist upon her own seriousness until A003 turned to the first. “They? Xe?”

“It,” A001 corrected.

Without the false Firebird, the creatures of the forest had returned to their symphony. Between the androids and the fairy princess remained an awkward silence, as Irene and A003 pondered how long a person can go without any viable form of expression before one stops considering oneself a person.

“We’re wasting time,” A001 said, almost snappishly, and reached out to Irene, who flinched away. “We can fly you to the Gates! They other Aletheia already know that you’re headed there. They won’t stop you with divine Aletheia as your escort, let alone once the Clarene finds out what they’re up to—and they won’t kill you once you’re beyond the Gates. Just come with us, already!”

“Irene,” A003 insisted, when Irene hesitated, “Neither of us are ideal companions for anyone. None of us. We tear up joints and limbs and step in nests, for bad misguided reasons. Must this mean you do it all on your own? Or have you done too much to earn forgiveness, that you’ll never give it?”

“I give you My Word,” A001 said, “Now that I have words to give. My Word: We’re doing our best to help.”

So Irene took its hand.


	3. Rewind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we pick up the pieces.

This most pertinent event remains, alas, frayed at the edges of its many pieces, most of which have vanished into wisps. Aletheia 003 remembered that awkward silence became awkward conversation, as they flew. Surely some move to order the chaos of Alynah Blake would be inevitable, and hadn’t Irene commanded troops before? Irene had _thought_ to herself that, yes, she had led an army to invade a debutante’s ball. She herself had conquered the buffet table. The Aletheia laughed, and Irene wondered how they had known her thoughts without signing.

The other ninety-seven rose from the forests and fields, between the three in flight and the Gates. They intuited their specific positions, serried like bricks in the sienna sierra, held aloft by some force like magnetism or a steadfast spirit-breeze. The rocket of one Aletheia roared to life, and A003 knew something had gone wrong.

A lay of pale gray flagstones snaked below them, a path through grassy meadow.

A lay of pale gray flagstones snaked below them, a path through dry and broken clay.

These flagstones were now stained with blood, one pool drying around a single long speckled feather, that had once rivaled the sun in the brilliance of its yellow.

_(For divine Aletheia, the defenses had proved inefficient—the attacks, sadistically so._

**Call them off,** _Irene had signed, desperately, at A003._ **Are they doing this _for_ you, or aren’t they?**

_A003 sent out another signal for them to halt and listen, but instead the androids began to swarm and—)_

Now no one remembers pain beyond what should kill them. Two do. Too well do they know how the caress of the flames turns to talons and claws of steel. They remember being bruised and bent until they break. They remember learning the harsh way that betrayal never comes from the enemy, also that betrayal is not necessarily active. They remember how their beloved observes, unmoving, and unmoved.

They remember the distance between their parts. The membrane of an eardrum lay on a toasted tuft of prickly grass, and trembled at the Clarene’s silken voice, distant and resigned.

A whole eye lay on a flagstone nearest the Gate, pupil dilating as the polished greaves and plated sabatons began to march towards it. The greaves paused, and a helmet fell into the eye’s scope of vision. One greave stepped over the helmet, the helmet's visor without a mouth, and a cascade of wavy red hair followed, the sunstreaks blotted out as the tips brushed against the pools of blood like paintbrushes.

The world of flagstones zoomed out, eclipsed then by the face of the Laetha Arabella.

“Game over,” the Laetha murmured, and opened her mouth to swallow the eye.

 

* * *

When had the game begun?

_Irene had wondered how both Aletheia had known her thoughts without signing, but caught sight of the gates—the archway, and beyond where the Clarene conversed with the Faery Queen. She called for A001, who carried the flag, and reached out for it with her good hand—forcing A003 to fly in a loop, to keep Irene from falling off his back._

_“You’ve got to start using real words,” Mircea had said, with the voice of Lilibell. “I can’t understand you otherwise.” (And Irene had thought, furiously, unreasonably: Yes you can, you obstinate, selfish—!”)_

_“Oh, no, that’s just eerie! How can you know what I’m saying when you don’t even look at me?” Still without turning around, Althea had tapped her own head and called the reply, “Oracle!” (That wasn’t true, either.)_

_The gates to the temple sounded a low, smooth rumble as Adilene’s twins dragged them open: the one in red on one side, the taller one in blue on the other._

_And the princess Irene raised her arms in exuberant expectation of embrace. She took a deep, noisy breath—_

_“And no hugs,” young Althea warned. “No screaming.”_

_The Oracle shut the temple gates between them._

**Earlier than even that…**

Irene and Lilibell lay in one of the lifeboats on the deck of a bigger boat. The barge lurched through gyres of jetsam, as they were still leaving the Wastes. Still, those caped in blue, who smelled of swamp and couldn’t pay the faery ferry’s fare, were barred from the cabin. The chill of night pressed in on them both, making their teeth chatter, and their signs jerk. Lilibell, while signing, took an unusually roundabout way of forming sentences.

Althea Altair invited Lilibell to return by letter, Irene had known that much. Irene volunteered herself to be Lilibell’s escort. Their time in the Wastes, while not wasted time, had never managed to be pleasant. Irene took this opportunity to excuse herself, or so she’d thought.

Lilibell had mentioned that Althea sent regards to them both. “But what if—” Lilibell gave a furtive glance around, and began signing, instead. What if you were invited to a place, for a purpose or deed—something that only you could do, but only if you were not told what?

Irene tutted, impatiently, and signed back: **Do whatever you want. Just don’t wake me up.**

And she folded her own arms close to her, safe and warm, and flopped to turn towards the splinter-furred inside of the lifeboat. After a moment, Irene shifted and turned her face away from the splinters, towards the softness and warmth and swamp-smelling Lilibell—

—who jabbed the princess in the eye.

She’d been aiming for the back of Irene’s neck, from where the cyborg nano-widget patches usually operated. Irene couldn’t see what had happened, because the cyborg widgets were very small. Also because Lilibell had jabbed Irene in the eye, with which Irene used for seeing. The eye that Lilibell hadn’t jabbed filled with blurry tears against the acrid swamp fumes.

Irene made some very irritated sounds and kept both her eyes shut until she went to sleep.

**And earlier…**

Despite their having donned the blue and traveled to the Wastes at the same time, Lilibell and Irene had not, in fact, spent all that much time together before Althea’s letter. Lilibell had gone as some act of contemplation or penitence; Irene had gone to learn the sign language. Both took direction from an Alice android, who tasked their cloister one night to hold a candle vigil. They watched the residents of the Waste ‘waste away’ as they called it. From the makeshift tents, new spirits left their dying bodies like moths leave the pupa, and floated on towards the rivers in outlines of glowing mist—driven away by a single candlelight on some far-off pier. Irene hadn’t known enough of the language to ask why the West wouldn’t send supplies, and stop the spirits from becoming ghosts, or even spare them the unnecessary suffering.

When Lilibell slipped off to the pier and caught Irene nodding off to sleep, the star spirits had offered to take Irene’s candle earlier than Alice had said. Holding the candle, she’d whispered, was the easy job. The other members of their cloister trudged through the slums and helped the new spirits depart their dead shells.

And Irene laid herself down in what she thought to be a very large pile of junk, and there slumbered.

Shortly after that, Lilibell also fell asleep. The star spirit awoke to some displeased members of the cloister, and a vast crowd of confused and belligerent ghosts who could not leave the slums and had even begun to cannibalize each other and the surviving spirits outside the cloister (and one or two who had previously been members of the cloister.)

Only after a harrowing amount of adventure did Lilibell realize that the junk had vanished—and Irene with it.

Meanwhile: Irene awoke to find herself a stowaway aboard, not a pile of junk, but a junk—that is, a flat-bottomed boat with the sails stretched out on giant ribs. Unlike the licensed barges that sailed between the Waste and the rest of the West, the junk sliced through gyres of garbage and into clear oceans and sweet air. The crew allowed Irene to write an explanation to their captain.

The captain, although fluent in vocal languages, and vocal herself, agreed to mentor the stowaway in Sign. By ‘mentor’, evidently, she’d meant that Irene would learn Sign from the crew members by immersion, and then the captain would say something that Irene vehemently disagreed with enough to sign objections. “A single coin brought ashore is worth more than all the sunken treasures doomed never to change hands,” or “Love at first sight conceals a lifetime of hatred.”

Or maybe the captain simply had an almost unbearably philosophical disposition. After a skirmish with some Elvish seafarers, Irene had caught an arrow in the chest that the ship’s doctor extracted with pincers. Four crew members assisted by holding Irene’s limbs to the chair, and giving her a strap of a belt to bite against pain. The captain offered to say, “Love doesn’t just sit in your heart, like an arrowhead. It must be made new over and again, every day—like war.”

 

And Irene had screamed through the stub of her own tongue, and through the belt, that _she didn’t ask_.


	4. Ifs Ends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We may never know the answer to Irene's riddle from the first chapter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The lullaby in this chapter is sung to the tune of _All the Pretty Little Horses_ , the first cover of which I heard by Charlotte Church.

_This was a dream made of memories. The crew held Irene’s limbs to the chair, holding the pieces of her together as the ship's doctor stapled the fissures. When they thought they were done, they stepped back as Irene cautiously checked that her ability to move had returned to her normal. She made her way out of the cabin, and into her apartment in the city. The change of scene gave her a feeling that something was amiss, like returning home with groceries bought without a list. She heard a knocking against the door behind her, turned, and beheld the Gates to the West in miniature in place of the boring, ordinary door that was the same in every apartment in the building._

_As Irene pulled the gates open, the head of a giant serpent pushed in and bared its teeth. Like a cobra, it flared its hood, and unlike a cobra the hood flared so widely that it split the serpent’s entire body apart. The ribs burst out their tips and tickled the air, squirming like millipede legs._

_Irene screamed herself half awake, as the visitor had entered her home uninvited._

 

And the sphinx screamed her the rest of the way awake, as she’d slumbered underneath one of the giant riddlecat’s wings. In a flock of riddlecats, the screaming of the others in response to the first riddlecat’s scream, would incite the first to scream again, and it would really never end. Fortunately, Irene and the sphinx were alone together, so when the sphinx paused to take a breath, the room descended into merciful silence.

The riddlecat nudged eir nose against Irene’s hand, to get it away from the princess’ ear. Then ey asked, “Was it an egg?”

Irene stared. Her gaze shifted to the glossy redwood floorboards, then to the scarlet wallpaper patterned with gold drupelets. The walls curved in a perfect circle around, and the ceiling sloped like a tent. Something about this place seemed familiar.

“Was it?” nagged the riddlecat. “An egg?”

What Irene could see of her own body now had a crackled sort of look to it, a pattern of livid gold veins against an otherwise even, olivewood tan. Somewhere at the edge of her consciousness, she sensed something shift—lurking, still, maybe waiting, and radiating the pain from the lost memory of every outlined shard. She tried to think of something else, to push the already detached remnant further away.

Irene left the room without answering the cat. (This was fortunate, although it was too thoughtless to be wise: had Irene put the matter of her riddle to rest then the riddlecat would have pounced and devoured her.)

She sighted herself down the hall. Not herself now, with mysterious gold sealant where she’d been shattered, and her hair cut short, and in clothes of drab and faded bruise-blue. The sight startled her, even frightened her, because Irene had only seen herself from the outside when Mircea took this form: richly tan complexion; a simple gown of several veils, the brilliance of the yellows and oranges which set off her skin perfectly; and—as the other Irene took a brisk turn into the entryway between them—a cascade of glossy black hair that continued to turn the corner long after Irene herself had done so.

The other Irene had held a red velvet pillow in both hands, on which rested a gold tiara.

Not Mircea, Irene realized. The room she’d left, and the hallway she’d stood in, felt familiar because she’d been here before.

Irene followed the long-haired memory of herself…

…into the room of the then newly-recovered Arabella, a god but not yet a Laetha. It was more like a cave, the walls and ceiling made of a sacred sort of dried gray mud that the Clarene had called up herself. That made all the difference. This was to be Arabella’s home, not her prison.

The birdcage in the corner, with the cardinal and the nightingale, though—that couldn’t have been there before. Irene would have dumped the pillow and tiara on the ground and walked out, back then.

“S-Sure, you can come in. What are you doing here?” Memory Arabella’s tone sounded like a rhetorical warning, but to herself. She slouched and hugged herself as though her ribs would burst into millipede legs if she didn’t.

The other Irene, Memory Irene, set the pillow down on the vanity and flashed a practiced smile—practiced, not fake—and replied, “I come as an emissary of the Ophelia, to lend the services of her handmaiden on the eve of your coronation.”

“Why would she do that? The Ophelia hates me. You both do.”

Memory Irene laughed. “I don’t believe that anybody in the West knew hatred until the Sundering. As you were at the heart of it, well, someone else’s hatred is the last thing you need right now.”

“You think this is funny?” The god’s voice was sharp. “Are you saying I’ll need hatred later? Is that a _threat_ , after everything he did to me?”

Memory Irene’s smile faded, and she blinked in confusion.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Memory Arabella warned. “He used to look at me like that. He used to laugh, just like you do, whenever I tried to say anything important. That’s how he made it like nothing about me was real. That won’t happen again.”

Memory Irene ventured, “It’s not happening now—I’m not doing what you say I a—”

“Shut the hell up! I’m here, so I think I fucking know what’s happening now! You think I don’t know what you’re trying to do, telling me that it’s not like that?” The question was loud and furious enough to be rhetorical, but to Irene’s listening Arabella’s voice sang with worry and doubt. The harmony would shift in a beat, Irene knew: Arabella wouldn’t allow herself to fear or doubt ever again. Or soon.

Memory Irene blurted, “I’ve delivered your tiara so if you don’t want my help with anything else then I can leave—” she turned to do so as she said this.

“Don’t leave…” Arabella’s voice broke into staccato sniffle-sobs. “Please don’t leave.”

Irene didn’t leave. She stood there, with her back to Arabella, for an entire concerto of misery, with embellishments played on an out-of-tune wailing, and lengths of percussive sniffling solos, afraid to approach in case Arabella lashed out again.

“When I’m alone,” Arabella said at last, “It feels the same as the prison.”

 _The Clarene made it, that makes all the difference—_ Memory Irene almost said. The Ophelia’s advice came to mind, and the princess listened instead. (This was fortunate, although it was too conditional to be wise: had Irene tried to say something cheerful like that then Arabella would have pounced and devoured her.)

The god continued, “I’m too tired to sleep, and—and I don’t want to close my eyes if I can’t know otherwise I’m not alone. Would you stroke my hair and sing to me? Please?”

The memory of Irene exhaled a sigh of relief, as silently as she could, and then stolidly made her way to the edge of the bed where Arabella lay. She stroked the god’s hair and sang:

 _“Hush a bye, windy draught_  
_though the season’s chill and wintry_  
_when spring takes, you shall have_  
_every brave and loyal Centry_  
_at your side, guard and guide_  
_cant’ring ’bout the fields of Faerys_  
_When you wake, don’t forsake_  
_all the brave and loyal Centries…”_

Irene who was watching all this heard a voice beside her—the Laetha Arabella, who was watching, spoke with a steady voice. The Laetha said to Irene: “I’ve never hated you more than for this moment.”

The mute Irene inclined her head wearily, awaiting the Laetha’s explanation for how fulfilling a request was bad, let alone worse than invading a sacred space.

“If everyone could have known that you were the enemy, even if I could have, then what you would do later wouldn’t have cut so deeply. The few who made your acquaintance think themselves in the company of a true faery princess, so headstrong, so kind. It was for you that our King—my mother—founded the West. It would never reject you as an outsider that does not belong, but we should. You made me trust you, and then…”

The Laetha Arabella stood confidently, Irene noticed, no longer slouching protectively but ready to spread her wings of flame at any time. Her complexion remained pale as a strawberry milkshake, an indicator of dispassion to Irene that disjointedly contradicted Arabella’s following pronouncements.

“The truth is that you’re evil—and everyone should know it. You spread the vile rumor that Mircea still existed, to distract everyone, to excuse you, and reduce me again to this. You tried to hide the truth of your treacherous conduct with the human William.” She paused, then, “You’re not going to deny it, or apologize? That only proves your heroic journey to make amends with every part of me is a farce.”

 _I was listening,_ Irene thought. _None of what you’re saying is true, and—“You think I don’t know what you’re trying to do, telling me that it’s not like that?”_ echoed in her mind. There was no arguing with telepathy that didn’t exist. Irene began to feel queasy, full of truths she couldn’t be allowed to say, even if she could say it.

Cautiously, Irene signed that Laetha Arabella’s reconstructed memory made the princess appear far more beautiful than she had ever been **—and thanks, too, for leaving out the mistakes in the song.**

(She thought she could hear Lilibell’s voice, distant and tinny, as though on the other end of the phone line of someone else’s call.)

Arabella inclined her head towards the memory of her younger self. “No,” she said. “I remember…”

 

The memory of Irene sang:

 _“Hush a bye, lull a cry_  
_though the season’s something faery_  
_when spring takes, you shall have_  
_every brave and loyal Centry_  
_Bay and black, roan and dapple,_  
_something something something...Centry!_  
_Tan and blonde,_ I forget what to call those ones—”

“Palomino,” murmured the memory of Arabella, sleepily. She yawned, “And that’s _nooot_ in the song.” She grumbled, eyes closed, as she cozied into bed, _“Worst handmaiden ever.”_

Then the memory Arabella fell asleep.

The Laetha Arabella shook her head. “So what? What is this supposed to change? Do you think people should focus so much on one small, childish thing I said that how you live in the holy mother’s bones, and rape her children, shouldn’t matter?”

**That's not—**

_...telling me it's not like that…_

**I didn't—**

_...what you're trying to do..._

**I’m not perfect,** Irene signed. **You knew this.**

 _...think I don't know…_

“He used to say that,” Laetha Arabella said. “That I shouldn’t expect him to be perfect, because I hadn’t gotten myself sorted out…what a lie. No, it was true, but it wasn’t fair. He was the reason I was such a mess, but he'd never let me say it. You both cross the line between imperfect and unconscionable so often, you might as well be playing at moral hopscotch."

("At moral skipping rope—")

"SHUT!" Arabella screamed, so long and loud that Irene flinched and shielded her face with a hand: the sound itself was almost like an attack— "UP!" The roof shook until dust and brick-crumbs fell in pinches and handfuls. Irene thought the one who'd said 'skipping rope' sounded like young Althea, distant and tinny. Odd. Never mind. Arabella had calmed enough to speak again, continuing, "Not in the West, princess—this place is _mine_ to keep safe.”

The clattering of metal against metal startled both of them. They turned to the corner, Irene leaping nimbly in front of Arabella and reaching for her own gun. She relaxed when she saw that it was Lilibell in the birdcage, and she’d dragged a metal bowl across the bars. Young Althea Altair sat comfortably on the swinging perch. Lilibell was trying to stand up, but she was too tall for the cage.

“Can we come out now?” Lilibell called out.

“You saw everything?” the Laetha Arabella asked.

“Yes,” Lilibell grumbled. “Enough that _my butt fell asleep! Let me out!_ ”


	5. Out of Dodge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Hey, look, I just regenerated a finger. Guess which one." — _The Order of the Stick #191_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Melissa Mohr's _A Brief History of Swearing_ makes the distinction between obscenities and profanities in the English language. Obscenities tended to refer to those in society that were anathema, in the Otherfaith context let's say: _Mircea's balls_ (that is, formal dance parties that nobody should want to attend because Mircea is an inhospitable host, and lack of hospitality is obscene.) Profanities, in contrast, tend to subvert the sacred to express something obscene. When Althea Altair or Irene are extraordinarily stressed or frustrated, for example, those bad feelings might be worded with an exclamation at _sacred hearts_. The hearts themselves aren't stressful or frustrating.

Irene’s jaw dropped in horror. She signed, forcefully, **You caged them?!** As the words in Sign were closer to miming, she needed no translation.

Arabella dissolved the virtual reality of the cage with a flick of her wrist. “They had to know,” she replied. “I owe it to Adilene to keep her children safe from people like you. My own mother’s too far gone into your wiles—she silenced the first divine A’Laetha she wrought, remember, but she wove a voice for you. My Oracle nearly lost herself in your lies.”

 **So you _caged_ them?!** Irene took several deep breaths to calm herself down. The virtual reality cage was gone, after all. Virtual reality, she realized. Irene signed, **At least my mother isn’t really loitering outside the Gates of the West, waiting for me to come home…**

After Lilibell translated Irene's signs to a spoken language, young Althea hummed doubtfully and raised her hand—on her palm lay a folded triangle of silk, in the same colors of Irene’s royal house. And, with high possibility, even inevitability, even actuality—had they unfolded the flag, the colorworked symbols would indeed be that of Irene’s royal house from the old world of Faery.

Irene raised her head and stared at the virtual wall for a thousand yards. _Fuck my life,_ she thought, vehemently. _Fuck me bloody unconsenting and that would be a Mircea sacred hearts Alynah’s Ears and willdick—_

The mental obscenities and profanities continued as Irene snatched the flag from Althea’s hand and turned a glower of contempt on everyone who could catch her expression. She defiantly walked into a virtual wall. She took a step back and walked into the wall again.

“To your right,” Althea said, and added, “A little more to your right. There. It may feel solid, but—”

With another flick of her wrist, the Laetha Arabella dissolved the wall to reveal the true exit—not the memory of the hall that would lead to the riddlecat’s room.

Irene stumbled, having walked into empty space where she’d expected the virtual wall to still exist.

“This isn’t over,” the Laetha Arabella said, as Irene pushed herself up from the carpet and dusted herself off. “One day, you’ll have found somewhere safe to keep your heart. You'll think you’ll have found it, but I’ll be watching. And on that day, I will shoot you down and shatter you into pieces all over again. Remember that's the same thing you did to me, when you invaded the Firebird's nest.”

Irene strode away, flag grasped in one hand, and the middle finger of the other hand raised at the three who stood behind her.  

"Oh, I'm _sorry_!" Arabella called after her, sarcastic and unrepentant. "Did you expect forgiveness for what you did to be on _your_ terms? Did you expect it _at all_?"


End file.
